Two national trophies, one decade of digital procurement, and a clear signal that Maharashtra is setting the pace for transparent public buying in India. At the 'Honouring Excellence' awards ceremony held in New Delhi to mark GeM's tenth anniversary, the state walked away with two of the event's most coveted recognitions on 13 August 2026, as announced by the Chief Minister's Office of Maharashtra.

The two awards Maharashtra brought home

The state received the 'GeM Grassroots Procurement Excellence Award' — honouring its drive to bring gram panchayats and local self-government bodies onto the platform — and the 'Highest GeM Procurement Value Since Inception' Bronze Award, recognising the sheer cumulative scale of Maharashtra's purchases through the marketplace since the portal went live.

Union Minister Piyush Goyal presented both awards. Dr. Kadambari Balkawade, Commissioner of Industries, accepted them on the state's behalf. Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis was tagged in the official announcement, underlining the political weight the government attaches to the recognition.

Why grassroots procurement is the harder win

Getting a state secretariat to log purchases on GeM is one thing. Getting a gram panchayat in rural Maharashtra to do the same is another challenge entirely — one of connectivity, capacity, and trust. The Grassroots Procurement Excellence Award specifically calls out Maharashtra's work on that last mile, pushing local bodies well below the district level to route their buying through the electronic marketplace rather than through informal or opaque channels.

This is precisely the frontier the central government has been trying to push since GeM's launch in 2016, when the platform replaced manual tendering with a centralised digital storefront for government purchases. A decade on, the emphasis has shifted from onboarding large ministries to pulling in every panchayat, municipality, and zilla parishad.

GeM at ten: a national scoreboard moment

The 'Honouring Excellence' ceremony is GeM's own report card at the ten-year mark — a moment for the platform's administrators to rank states on adoption depth and transaction volume. Maharashtra's Bronze in cumulative procurement value places it among the top-tier buyers nationally, even as several other large states compete on the same metric. The awards serve a dual purpose: they reward past performance and create competitive pressure on state governments to deepen usage going forward.

For Maharashtra, the double win arrives at a time when the Fadnavis administration has been keen to project governance credibility — and a national award handed over by a Union Cabinet minister in the capital is precisely the kind of moment that reinforces that narrative without requiring a single political speech.

A state that can get its gram panchayats buying on a national digital platform is a state that has done the unglamorous implementation work — and on GeM's tenth birthday, that work just earned Maharashtra a place on the national podium.